I wrote a few days ago about how excited we are in our house at the outcome of the Iowa caucus. What I didn’t write about is all the other things that have happened around here in the last week.

On Sunday Mike and I won our Fantasy Football league championship - for the second year in a row. Sweeet! Seeing as it is also only our second year playing fantasy football, we were pretty psyched. Of course now no one in our league is speaking to us, so maybe we would have been better off throwing the game.

On Monday we bought a new car. We got the Mazda5 in Redskin Red (ok, the dealership calls it “copper red”. Whatever.) and we are in love with it. It is zippy and has zoom zoom and doesn’t make me feel like a soccer mom. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it’s just not where I am at this point in my life - give me a few years though. You had to be a contortionist to get Emma into her car seat with our old car. Now I don’t even have to bend over. W00t!

On Thursday…well, everyone knows what happened on Thursday.

On Saturday Emma turned 13 months old.

She had her first day of daycare this week. It was a half-day really, so we could ease her into it. Yeah, I know, it wasn’t to ease her into it, it was to ease me into it. She didn’t even cry when I left. By contrast, I was a mess. They do art projects and go on fieldtrips and play outside at the daycare, which will be really good for her since I seriously think she may be bored with me at home. Of course now I am going to have step up my game on the days she is with me or she is going to start asking to go to daycare every day.

Emma had her first real playdate this week too. It was with a little boy who is almost exactly her age. We went to his house and she was a little more restrained than I expected. To be fair, E. was flinging balls at her head a lot of the time, so maybe she was just figuring out how to get home alive. Neither of them have gotten to the “sharing” stage quite yet, so there was a lot of parental intervention required. We had a good time though and E. and his mom will probably be coming here in a week or two.

Emma started twirling this week. She looked up at me one morning and then started spinning around in a circle until she got dizzy and fell over. She laughed the whole time. I have no idea where she learned it (daycare?) but now when I say “Emma, twirl!” she spins and spins. It is a riot.

She continues to love music and uses her knees to bounce up and down and dance. She is a great eater and so far has not shown an aversion to particular foods that I have read so many toddlers develop. Speaking of toddlers, she has had a couple of full blown lie-on-the-floor-and-kick-your-feet type tantrums which were amazing to behold. The tantrums were short lived and luckily we were at home, but we are really hoping they aren’t signs of the “terrible twos” coming a little early.

Her only word is still “Da” for her daddy, but (terrifyingly) she seems to understand a lot of what we say. She follows simple directions like “go get your Bear” or “sit down in the bathtub”. Oddly, it seems for some reason that when we say “don’t touch the dog food” she hears “please pick up that very full bowl of dog food and dump it all over the kitchen floor”. I guess we should have her ears looked at…

I continue to be amazed at how much FUN it is to have a little person to hang out with. It’s the part of parenting that not a whole lot of people really talk about. Mike and I could sit and watch her play and dance and laugh for hours and hours, and once she starts talking? Fuhgeddaboutit.